Venn Diagrams

Venn diagrams were invented by a guy named John Venn (no kidding; that was really his name) as a way
of picturing relationships between different groups of things. (Inventing this type of diagram was,
apparently, pretty much all he ever accomplished. To add insult to injury, much of what we refer to as
"Venn diagrams" are actually "Euler" diagrams. But we'll stick with the usual "Venn" terminology for the
purposes of this lesson.) Since the mathematical term for "a group of things" is "a set", Venn diagrams
can be used to illustrate both set relationships and logical relationships.

To draw a Venn diagram, you first draw a rectangle which is called your "universe". In the context of Venn
diagrams, the universe is not "everything", but "everything you're dealing with right now". Let's deal with
the following list of things: moles, swans, rabid skunks, geese, worms, horses, Edmontosorum (a variety
of duck-billed dinosaurs), platypusses, and a very fat cat.

We'll call our universe "Animals":

Let's say we want to classify things according

to being small and furry or being a duck-bill.
We draw circles to display our classifications:

Now we'll fill in, or "populate", the diagram.

Moles, rabid skunks, platypusses, and my
(dear departed) cat are all small and furry:

Swans, geese, platypusses, and

Edmontosorum are all duck-bills:

Worms are small but not furry and horses are

furry but not small, and neither is a duck-bill.
However, they are animals; they fit inside our
universe, but outside the circles.

Notice that "platypusses" is listed in both of the circles. The point of Venn diagrams is that we
can show this overlap in set membership by overlapping these circles.

In other words, we really should have drawn

the circles overlapped, like this:

Now when we populate the Venn diagram,

we'll only have to write "platypusses" once, in
the overlap:

The overlap of the two circles, containing only "platypusses", is called the "intersection" of the two sets.
(By the way, the plural of "platypus" is not "platypi", but is, in general [Australian] usage, "platypusses",
though I have learned that the technically-correct plural is apparently "platypode".)

When drawing Venn diagrams, you will probably always be dealing with two or three overlapping circles,
since having only one circle would be boring, and having four or more circles quickly becomes
astonishingly complicated.

Venn Diagrams & Set Notation

The following examples should help you understand the notation, terminology, and concepts related to
Venn diagrams and set notation.

Let's say that our universe contains the numbers 1, 2, 3, and 4. Let A be the set containing the numbers
1 and 2; that is, A = {1, 2}. (Warning: The curly braces are the customary notation for sets. Do not use
parentheses or square brackets.) Let B be the set containing the numbers 2 and 3; that is, B = {2, 3}.
Then we have the following relationships, with pinkish shading marking the solution "regions" in the Venn
diagrams:

set
pronunciation meaning Venn diagram answer
notation

everything
AUB "A union B" that is in {1, 2, 3}
either of the sets

A^B only the things

or "A intersect B" that are in {2}
both of the sets

Ac "A complement",
everything
or in the universe {3, 4}
or "not A" outside of A
~A

everything in A
"A minus B", or
A–B except for anything {1}
"A complement B" in its overlap with B

everything
~(A U B) "not (A union B)" outside {4}
A and B
~(A ^ B) everything outside
or "not (A intersect B)" of the overlap {1, 3, 4}
~( ) of A and B

There are gazillions of other possibilities for set combinations and relationships, but these are among the
simplest and most common. Note that different texts use different set notation, so you should not be at all
surprised if your text uses still other symbols than those used above. But while the notation may differ, the
concepts will be the same. By the way, as you probably noticed, your Venn-diagram "circles" don't have
to be perfectly round; ellipses will do just fine.

 Given the following Venn diagram, shade in A ^ C.

The intersection of A and C is just the overlap between those two circles, so:

 Given the following Venn diagram, shade in A U(B – C).

As usual when faced with parentheses, I'll work from the inside out.
 I'll first find B – C. "B complement
C" means I take B and then throw
out its overlap with C, which gives
me this:

Now I have to union this with A:

Note that unioning with A put some of C (that is, some of what I'd cut out when I did "B – C") back into
the answer. This is okay. Just because we threw out C at one point, doesn't mean that it all has to stay
out forever.

Venn diagram word problems generally give you two or three classifications and a bunch of numbers.
You then have to use the given information to populate the diagram and figure out the remaining
information. For instance:

 Out of forty students, 14 are taking English Composition and 29 are taking Chemistry. If
five students are in both classes, how many students are in neither class? How many are
in either class? What is the probability that a randomly-chosen student from this group is
taking only the Chemistry class?

There are two classifications in this universe: English students and Chemistry students.

First I'll draw my universe for the forty

students, with two overlapping circles
labelled with the total in each:

Since five students are taking both

classes, I'll put "5" in the overlap:
 I've now accounted for five of the 14
English students, leaving nine students
taking English but not Chemistry, so I'll
put "9" in the "English only" part of the
"English" circle:

I've also accounted for five of the 29

Chemistry students, leaving 24
students taking Chemistry but not
English, so I'll put "24" in the
"Chemistry only" part of the "Chemistry"
circle:

This tells me that a total of 9 + 5 + 24

= 38 students are in either English or
Chemistry (or both). This leaves two
students unaccounted for, so they must
be the ones taking neither class.

From this populated Venn diagram, I can get the answers to the questions.

Two students are taking neither class.

There are 38 students in at least one of the classes.
There is a 24/40 = 0.6 = 60% probability that a randomly-chosen student in this
group is taking Chemistry but not English.

 Suppose I discovered that my cat had a taste for the adorable little geckoes that live in the
bushes and vines in my yard, back when I lived in Arizona. In one month, suppose he
deposited the following on my carpet: six gray geckoes, twelve geckoes that had dropped
their tails in an effort to escape capture, and fifteen geckoes that he'd chewed on a little.
Only one of the geckoes was gray, chewed on, and tailless; two were gray and tailless but
not chewed on; two were gray and chewed on but not tailless. If there were a total of 24
geckoes left on my carpet that month, and all of the geckoes were at least one of "gray",
"tailless", and "chewed on", how many were tailless and chewed on but not gray?

If I work through this step-by-step, using what I've been given, I can figure out what I need in
order to answer the question. This is a problem that takes some time and a few steps to solve.
There was one gecko that was gray, tailless,
and chewed on, so I'll draw my Venn
diagram with three overlapping circles, and
put "1" in the center overlap:

Two were gray and tailless but not chewed

on, so "2" goes in the rest of the overlap
between "gray" and "tailless".

Two were gray and chewed on but not

tailless, so "2" goes in the rest of the overlap
between "gray" and "chewed-on".

Since a total of six were gray, and since 2 +

1 + 2 = 5 have already been accounted for,
this tells me that there was only one left that
was only gray.

This leaves me needing to know how many were tailless and chewed on
but not gray, which is what the problem asks for. Since I don't know how
many were only chewed on or only tailless, I cannot yet figure out the
answer.
I'll let "x" stand for this unknown number of
tailless, chewed-on geckoes.

I do know the total number of chewed

geckoes (15) and the total number of tailless
geckoes (12). This gives me:

only chewed on: 15 – 2 – 1 – x = 12 – x

only tailless: 12 – 2 – 1 – x = 9 – x

There were a total of 24 geckoes for the month, so adding up all the sections of the diagram's
circles gives me:

1 + 2 + 1 + 2 + x + (12 – x) + (9 – x) = 27 – x = 24

Solving, I get that x = 3.